Nation’s Future, Leader’s Fate Intertwine

Her rise to power in 1993 seemed serendipitous. Elegant, educated and English-speaking, Tansu Ciller embodied the aspirations of most Turks--and leaders in the West--to keep this Muslim nation and NATO member firmly in the camp of secular European democracies.

But over the past year, the applause for Turkey’s first female prime minister has turned to dismay. Struggling to shield herself from corruption charges, Ciller made a deal that allowed Islamists to lead the government and push a revival of religion in public life.

Deputy prime minister now, she has resisted fierce pressure from the military to quit an 11-month-old coalition and bring down Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan, modern Turkey’s first leader from an Islamist party.

In recent days, with the coalition’s survival threatened by defections from her party, Ciller has taken a bold new tack: Though far less popular than Erbakan, she has demanded that they swap jobs so she can save their alliance and lead Turkey to early elections.

If the power play works--the two leaders are reported near agreement--it will be a remarkable feat of survival for a once-popular leader now hated by most of her country.

“Everybody’s out to get her, and she knows that once she’s gone from power, that’s the end of her political life,” said Sedat Ergin of Hurriyet, one of Turkey’s largest newspapers. “But she’s a damn good survivor. She’s been encircled before and always finds a way out.”

Ciller’s fate, whichever way it turns, will tilt the course of an officially secular Turkey that is deeply polarized between Islam and the West. As the country’s leading secularist politician, Ciller has defended her alliance as a moderating force on her Islamist partners.

But many who once admired her as a force for progress now revile her as a symbol of the corruption and thuggery that have undermined Turkey’s secular institutions and added to the appeal of the Islamists, who form the country’s biggest and best-organized political movement.

“There’s something tragic about Ciller,” said Feride Acar, a political sociologist at Ankara’s Middle East Technical University. “She was a strong, successful politician, a real leader, a tremendous role model for women. . . . But she has become so obsessed with staying in power that it’s difficult to know what she stands for anymore--other than self-protection.”

An economist with little political experience, Ciller, now 52, vaulted into the top government job in July 1993, when the ruling True Path Party chose her to replace Prime Minister Suleyman Demirel, who moved to the more ceremonial job of president.

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Ciller’s government, which lasted until December 1995, was embattled from the start.

She forged a difficult trade pact with the European Union, but the free hand she gave the military to fight Kurdish separatists brought condemnation from human-rights advocates.

More recently, Ciller has been hurt by a scandal that has grown from the crash in November of an armor-plated black Mercedes-Benz in which a member of parliament from her party, a senior police official and a fugitive wanted for murder and drug smuggling were traveling together.

A subsequent parliamentary probe turned up evidence suggesting that Ciller’s government sponsored anti-separatist death squads. And in January, a German judge hearing a case against three accused Turkish heroin traffickers said he believed they had “personal contacts” with Ciller.

A more serious challenge is the repeated effort by lawmakers to investigate how Ciller and her husband, Ozer Ciller, gained their wealth--estimated by the Turkish press to be tens of millions of dollars.

Ciller pulled out of a brief secularist coalition government last spring after then-Prime Minister Mesut Yilmaz decided to support such an investigation. She then made her alliance with Erbakan’s pro-Islamic Welfare Party, which has since dropped its support for the probe.

Yilmaz has condemned “a dirty partnership” that keeps Islamists in power and Ciller out of court.

The former prime minister, who has since declined interviews on the subject, had previously claimed that much of her wealth grew from investment of a $1.1-million inheritance from her widowed mother.

But Dogan Akin, a Turkish journalist who wrote a book about Ciller’s finances, said the mother was poor at the time of her death in 1995. Citing tax documents and court papers, his book argues that the Cillers profited from the collapse of a bank headed by Ozer Ciller and enhanced their wealth through tax evasion.

Ciller has defended her alliance with the Welfare Party on political grounds, claiming that she serves as a check on Erbakan’s policies.

Indeed, Ciller persuaded Erbakan to withdraw a proposal to allow female civil servants to wear veils or head scarves to work in keeping with Islamic teaching. And the Interior Ministry, run by a member of her party, has shut down some unlicensed Koran schools run by fundamentalists.

On a more divisive issue, however, Ciller has balked at introducing in parliament a reform that the military has demanded and that she claims to support. The proposed law would require eight years of secular education for Turkish children and eliminate hundreds of state-run Islamic junior high schools.

Unable to sway Erbakan from his life’s dream of a more Islamic-influenced state, the armed forces, Turkey’s self-appointed guardians of secularism since the 1920s, have turned their pressure on Ciller’s True Path Party in recent weeks, prompting five of its lawmakers to defect. On Friday, the coalition lost its parliamentary majority.

Ciller’s will to resist, her associates say, is based on her conviction that the military lacks the will to oust the government by force--as it has done three times since 1960.

“We warned her that the military would intervene if the politicians cannot solve the problem,” said Yildirim Aktuna, a True Path deputy, recalling a stormy party meeting before he resigned as health minister a month ago. “But she wouldn’t listen. . . . She has a hero complex. She thinks she can take on anyone--including the generals.”

What could ease Ciller’s return to power is the Islamists’ urgency for an early election--before the pro-secular Constitutional Court can rule on a motion filed last week by Turkey’s top prosecutor to ban their Welfare Party on the grounds that it is “dragging the country to the brink of civil war.”